The immigration of the Pilgrims to New England occurred in stages. But that they
had to go somewhere became apparent soon enough. Theirs was the position of the
Separatist: they believed that the reforms of the Anglican church had not gone far enough,
that, although the break with Catholicism in 1535 had moved some way toward the
Puritan belief in and idea of religious authority grounded solely in Scripture, by
substituting king for pope as the head of the church, England was only recapitulating an
unnecessary, corrupt, and even idolatrous order (Gill, 19-21). In one basic respect, the
Pilgrims are a logical outcome of the Reformation. In its increasing dissemination of the
Bible, the increasing emphasis on it as the basis of spiritual meaning, the subsequently
increasing importance of literacy as a mode of religious authority and awareness, a
growing individualism was implicit. This individualism may then have easily led to an
atomization or dispersion of authority that the monarchy duly feared, and that later
generations of Americans could easily label democratization. As a writer in 1921
put it, "They accepted Calvin's rule, that those who are to exercise any public function in
the church should be chosen by common voice" (Wheelwright, vii). However much this
might emphasize the democratic qualities of the Pilgrims, as dissenters they do suggest at
some level the origins of democratic society, in its reliance upon contending and even
conflicting points of view, and in its tendency toward a more fluid social structure.

But theirs was a religious, not a political agenda; moral and theological principles
were involved, and from their perspective, there could be no compromise. For them 2
Corinthians made it clear: "Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the
Lord." To achieve and preserve a simplicity and 'purity' that they felt had been lost amid
the some of the surviving features of Catholicism--the rituals which continued through into
the Anglican Church and were epitomized in its statement, "'I believe in...the holy
Catholick Church'" (Gill, 19). To establish themselves as rightful interpreters of the Bible
independent of an inherited social and cultural order, they removed from the Anglican
Church in order to re-establish it as they believed it truly should be. This of course meant
leaving the country, and they left for Holland in 1608.

After 12 years, they decided to move again. Having gone back to England to
obtain the backing of the Virginia Company, 102 Pilgrims set out for America. The reasons are
suggested by William Bradford, when he notes the "discouragements" of the
hard life they had in Holland, and the hope of attracting others by finding "a better, and
easier place of living"; the "children" of the group being "drawne away by evill examples
into extravagence and dangerous courses"; the "great hope, for the propagating and advancing the
gospell of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world"
(Wheelwright, 7-8). In these reasons, the second sounds most like the Pilgrims many
Americans are familiar with--the group that wants to be left alone and live in its own pure
and righteous way. Behind it seems to lie not only the fear of the breakdown of individual
families, but even a concern over the dissolution of the larger community. The concern
seems to be that their split with England was now only effecting their own disolution into
Dutch culture. But it is also interesting to note the underlying traces of evangelism in, if
not the first, certainly the last of the reasons. On the one hand, this strain would find its
later expression (and perversion) in such portrayals of the Pilgrims as the Rotunda fresco,
where the idea of conversion is baldly fashioned within the image of conquest; here, the
Indian is shown as subdued before the word of the "kingdom" even as the Pilgrims are
landing, and the Pilgrim is seen as an agent of domination, a superior moral force
commanding by its sheer presence. On the other hand, such a portrayal suggests an
uneasy tension with the common (and seemingly accurate) conception of the Pilgrims as a
model of tolerance. Indeed, the first of their reasons for sailing to America is fairly
passive--they want to "draw" others by the example of their prosperity, not necessarily go
conquer and actively convert. Such an idea reflects the one that would be expressed
explicitly by the Puritan John Winthrop, where the New World would become a beacon of
religious light, a model of spiritual promise, a "citty upon a hill."

In any case, from their own point of view, they are 'agents' only insofar as they are
agents of Providence, and as Bradford strives to make clear throughout, the narrative of
their actions is only an interpretation of the works of God. Thus, in a remarkable instance
when a "proud and very profane yonge man" who "would curse and swear most bitterly"
falls overboard from the Mayflower and drowns, it is seen as "the just hand of God upon
him" (Wheelwright, 14). So too when a member of their party is saved from drowning, or
when the initial landing party finds the corn and beans for seed, or with their safe arrival at
Plymouth Bay in general, is the "spetiall providence of God" evinced. And Bradford
seems to self-consciously maintain this version of the Christian perspective as an historical
one, never allowing the reader or student of the Pilgrims to forget that their story is one
with a trajectory--coming from its beginnings England, and moving through the beginnings
of the 'New World'. This is an emphasis that will serve histories and memories alike,
especially in viewing the Revolution and the increased democratization of the United
States as some necessary fulfillment of the Pilgrim promise.

the mayflower compact

Naturally, the primary text for later interpreters would be the Mayflower Compact,
which Bradford gives:

In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwriten, by
the loyall subjects of our dread soveraigne Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great
Britaine, Franc, and Ireland king, defender of the faith, etc.

Haveing undertaken, for the glorie of God, and advancemente of the Christian
faith, and honour of our king and countrie, a voyage to plant the first colonie in the
Northerne parts of Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly and mutually in the
presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine our selves togeather into
a civill body politick, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of
the ends aforesaid; and by vertue hereof to enacte, constitute and frame shuch just
and equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as
shall be thought most meete and convenient for the generall good of the Colonie,
unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witnes whereof we
have hereunder subscribed our names at Cap-Codd the .11. of November, in the
year of the raigne of our soveraigne lord, King James, of England, France, and
Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fiftie-fourth. Anno Dom. 1620
(Wheelwright, 32-33)

Bradford writes of the Compact, that it developed partly in response to "the discontented
and mutinous speeches" of some of the "strangers"--colonists who had travelled with them
but who "were uncommitted to church fellowship"--and that it asserted and firmed the
Pilgrims' "owne libertie; for none had the power to command them, the patente they had
being for Virginia, and not for New england...." The Compact thus arose out of a need to
maintain social and civic coherence, to ensure that the officials elected and the group as a
whole would have some legitimation against challenges to its "legal authority" (McQuade,
140; Wheelwright, 32). Michael Kammen, however, notes a "tradition" in the early 19th
century "in which the Compact was viewed as part of the repudiation of English
domination" (Kammen, 64). Surely there are evident democratic tendencies in the text, wherein a
code established from the consent of the people becomes the underpinning of a
society of "just and equall lawes," where the officials and figures of authority are all
elected. But as "loyall subjects" to the "dread soveraigne Lord, King James," their task is
twofold: to maintain a degree of independence that would allow them to live in
accordance with their Separatist views, but also to keep the ties to England strong enough
so that those who did not share their religion nevertheless would be bound by an order
ultimately traceable to the Crown. The misreadings that Kammen notes will be discussed
further in following sections.

thanksgiving and the indians

The first few months were grueling for the Pilgrims. Half of their 102 members
perished: "of the 17 male heads of families, ten died during the first infection"; of the 17
wives, only three were left after three months. When such devastation is seen against the
following summer, when conditions improved so that Bradford would write of "all things
in good plenty," the sincerity of 'Thanksgiving' becomes apparent. Regardless of how far
removed one may be now or even may have been when it was established as a national
holiday in 1863, the sense of Providence had undoubtedly been heightened to an extreme
pitch for the Pilgrims. After such devastating sickness, everyday survival itself was
probably seen as cause for gratitude, but when given a full and prosperous harvest (with
the help and instruction of Native Americans such as Squanto), the previous ordeal could
be understood as a trial by God, a test of faith, the heavenly reward prefigured by an
earthly one.

The institutional--by which is meant primarily the Capitol's--portrayal of Native Americans
throughout the establishment of Plymouth Plantation stands in curious relation to Braford's
narrative. First of all, there is the initial landing party, with its description of
the men led by Captain Miles Standish, firing shots into the darkness at "a hideous and
great crie." This they mistook for a "companie of wolves, or such like wild beasts," until
the next morning's skirmish--when the "arrowes came flying" and one "lustie man, and no
less valiente" who "was seen shoot .3. arrowes" and "stood .3. shot of a musket..."
(Wheelwright, 25-26). This is hardly the humble servant offering up the corn at the mere
sight of the Pilgrim's arrival (see the Rotunda fresco). And
when Samoset, the first representative of the Indians, comes to speak (in "broken
English") with the Pilgrims, "he came bouldly amongst them" (emphasis added);
and having had previous contact with Europeans, he presumably knew as much or more
about the Pilgrims than they about him. Squanto, who had been to England and could
communicate well with the colonists, and who taught them "how to set their corne, wher
to take fish, and to procure other commodities," is understood by the Pilgrims as "a
spetiall instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation" (Wheelwright,
41). Regardless of the sense of utility in such an expression (all things being for them the
effect or instrument of God), there is an undeniable gratitude, and even the sense of
dependence that those must have before one who would provide aid and instruction. The
treaty with Massasoit was initiated not by the Pilgrims but by the sachem himself, who had already
made an equivalent pact with earlier explorers. The success of the treaty during
Massasoit's lifetime suggests an equality, fairness, and tolerance that would be idealized
and wistfully re-presented in various remembrances of the overall colonial experience. It
allows both the positive exemplar of the 'Indian' in Massasoit, and reassurance of
European good-faith in dealing with him. It follows:

.1. That neither he (Massasoit) nor any of his, should injurie or doe hurt to any of
their peopl(e).
.2. That if any of his did any hurte to any of theirs, he should send the offender, that they might
punish him.
.3. That if any thing were taken away from any of theirs, he should cause it to be restored; and
they should do like to him.
.4. If any did unjustly warr against him, they would aide him; if any did warr
against them, he should aide them. He should send to his neighbours confederates,
to certifie them of his, that they might not wrong them, but might be likewise comprised in the
conditions of peace.

The most obvious difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans is that the Puritans had
no intention of breaking with the Anglican church. The Puritans were
nonconformists as were the Pilgrims, both of which refusing to accept an authority beyond
that of the revealed word. But where with the Pilgrims this had translated into something
closer to an egalitarian mode, the "Puritans considered religion a very complex, subtle, and
highly intellectual affair," and its leaders thus were highly trained scholars, whose
education tended to translate into positions that were often authoritarian. There was a
built-in hierarchism in this sense, but one which mostly reflected the age: "Very few
Englishmen had yet broached the notion that a lackey was as good as a lord, or that any
Tom, Dick, or Harry...could understand the Sermon on the Mount as well as a Master of
Arts from Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard" (Miller, I: 4, 14). Of course, while the Puritan
emphasis on scholarship did foster such class distinction, it nevertheless encouraged education
among the whole of its group, and in fact demanded a level of learning and
understanding in terms of salvation. Thomas Hooker stated in The Application of
Redemption, "Its with an ignorant sinner in the midst of all means as with a sick man
remaining in the Apothecaries shop, ful of choycest Medicines in the darkest night:
...because he cannot see what he takes, and how to use them, he may kill himself or encrease his
distempers, but never cure any disease" (qtd. in Miller, I: 13).

Knowledge of Scripture and divinity, for the Puritans, was essential. This was an
uncompromising attitude that characterized the Puritans' entry into New England,
according to Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, whose thematic anthology, The
Puritans (1932, 1963), became a key text of revisionist historicism, standing as an
influential corrective against the extreme anti-Puritanism of the early twentieth century.
Following Samuel Eliot Morison, they noted that the emphasis on education saw the
establishment, survival, and flourishing of Harvard College--which survived only because
the entire community was willing to support it, so that even the poor yeoman farmers
"contributed their pecks of wheat" for the continued promise of a "literate ministry"
(Miller, I: 14). And again, to their credit, Puritan leaders did not bolster the knowledge of
its ministry simply to perpetuate the level of power of the ruling elite. A continuing goal
was to further education among the laity, and so ensure that not only were the right and
righteous ideas and understandings being held and expressed, but that the expressions
were in fact messages received by a comprehending audience. An Act passed in
Massachusetts in 1647 required "that every town of one hundred families or more should
provide free common and grammar school instruction." Indeed, the first "Free Grammar School"
was established in Boston in 1635, only five years after the Massachusetts Bay
Colony was founded (Miller, II: 695-97). For all the accusations of superstition and
narrow-mindedness, the Puritans could at least be said to have provided their own antidote in
their system of schools. As John Cotton wrote in Christ the Fountaine of Life,
"zeale is but a wilde-fire without knowledge" (qtd. in Miller, I: 22).

The Puritans who, in the 1560s, first began to be (contemptuously) referred to as
such, were ardent reformers, seeking to bring the Church to a state of purity that
would match Christianity as it had been in the time of Christ. This reform was to involve,
depending upon which Puritan one asked, varying degrees of stripping away practices seen
as residual "popery"--vestments, ceremony, and the like. But many of the ideas later
associated strictly with the Puritans were not held only by them. The Calvinist doctrine of
predestination, with which Puritanism agreed, was held by the Pilgrims as well: both
believed that the human state was one of sin and depravity; that after the Fall all but an
elect group were irrevocably bound for hell; that, because God's knowledge and power
was not limited by space or time, this group had always been elect. In other words, there
was nothing one could do about the condition of one's soul but try to act as one would
expect a heaven-bound soul to act.

As Perry Miller points out, they inherited Renaissance humanism just as they
inherited the Reformation, and so held an interesting place for reason in their overall
beliefs. The Puritan idea of "Covenant Theology" describes how "after the fall of man,
God voluntarily condescended...to draw up a covenant or contract with His creature in
which He laid down the terms and conditions of salvation, and pledged Himself to abide
by them" (Miller, I: 58). The doctrine was not so much one of prescription as it was of
explanation: it reasoned why certain people were saved and others were not, it
gave the conditions against which one might measure up one's soul, and it ensured that
God would abide by "human conceptions of right and justice"--"not in all aspects, but in
the main" (Miller, I: 58). The religious agency for the individual Puritan was then located
in intense introspection, in the attempt to come to an awareness of one's own spiritual
state. As with the Pilgrims, the world, history, everything for the Puritan became a
text to be interpreted. One could not expect all of God's actions to be limited by
one's ideas of reason and justice, but one at least had a general sense, John
Cotton's "essentiall wisdome," as guidance. And of course, one had the key, the basis of
spiritual understanding, the foundational text and all-encompassing code, the Bible.

salem witchcraft

It was because the Puritan mode of interpretivity--with its readings of providence
and secondary causes--could reach such extremes that the Salem witch-trials broke out.
Of course, as Thomas H. Johnson writes, the belief in witches was generally questioned by
no one--Puritan or otherwise--"and even as late as the close of the seventeenth century
hardly a scientist of repute in England but accepted certain phenomena as due to
witchcraft." But the Puritan cosmology held a relentless imaginative power, especially
demonstrated in narratives wherein Providence was shown to be at work through nature
and among human beings. The laity read and took in such readings or demonstrations of
Providence, and the ministry felt compelled by a sense of official responsibility to offer
their interpretations and explain the work of God in the world (Miller, II: 734-35).

Johnson notes the "lurid details" of Cotton Mather's Memorable Providences,
Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689), which helped generate an unbalanced
fascination with witchcraft. This would prove both fire and tinder for Salem Village, so
that "by September, twenty people and two dogs had been executed as witches" and
hundreds more were either in jail or were accused (Miller, II: 735). Yet to envision the
Puritan community at this point simply as a mob of hysterical zealots is to lose sight of
those prominent figures who stood against the proceedings. Granted that they did not
speak out too loudly at the height of the fervor, but then to do so would be to risk
exposure to a confusion of plague-like properties, where the testimony of an alleged
victim alone was enough to condemn a person. But it was the injustice of this very
condition against which men such as Thomas Brattle and Increase Mather wrote.
Brattle's "A Full and Candid Account of the Delusion called Witchcraft...." (1692) argued
that the evidence was no true evidence at all, because the forms of the accused
were taken to be the accused, and the accusers, in declaring that they were
informed by the devil as to who afflicted them, were only offering the devil's testimony.
His was an argument which seemed wholly reasonable to many, but it led Brattle to the
fear "that ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will
leave behind them upon our land" (In Miller, II: 762). Mather wrote in 1693, in Cases
of Conscience concerning Evil Spirits, that "it were better that Ten Suspected
Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person be Condemned" (Qtd. in Miller, II:
736).

Beyond this is as well is the journal of Samuel Sewall, which records his
fascinating approach to what had happened. This complicates the idea of the 'Puritan' on
another level because while Brattle and (Increase) Mather may have offered challenges to
any conception of the homogeneity of Puritan belief, Sewall reminds one of the variability
within an individual. It introduces an axis of time by which the measure of the
'Puritan mind' must be adjusted. On Christmas Day, 1696, one reads the terse opening,
"We bury our little daughter." And three weeks later is a transcript of the notice Sewall
had posted publicly. It relates that "Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated strokes of
God upon himself and family...Desires to take the Blame and Shame of [the Salem
proceedings], Asking pardon of Men..." (In Miller, 513). This is once again an
interpretation of the "reiterated strokes of God" which has brought the sense of shame to
his consciousness, and it suggests that, at least for Puritans such as Sewall, these readings
of nature and events are not merely those of convenience or self-justification. There is at
least the indication here that if some Puritans stood ready to see the guilt in others, some
of those same people at least made their judgments in good faith and with honesty, giving
credence to their understanding of the ways of God, even when they themselves were the
object of judgment. Sewall's example suggests a kind of Puritan whose Puritanism not
only carries him to almost inhuman extremes, but also relentlessly brings him back, full
circle, to humility.

the revealed word, antinomianism, individualism

What also must be emphasized is the absolute ground of religious understanding
that the Biblical text represented for the Puritans. The Bible was the Lord's revealed
word, and only through it does He directly communicate to human beings. While the
natural world may be studied and interpreted in order to gain a sense of His will, He is
not the world itself, and does not instill Himself directly into human beings by means
of visitations or revelations or divine inspirations of any sort (Miller, I: 10). The
antinomian crisis involving Anne Hutchinson focused on this issue. John Winthrop
records it in his journal:

[October 21, 1636] One Mrs. Hutchinson, a
member of the church of Boston, a woman of ready wit and bold
spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errors: 1. That the
person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person. 2. That no
sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification....(In
Miller I: 129)

What the Puritans faced in Hutchinson, or in the Quaker idea of "inner light" which
allowed every person direct access to God, was an outbreak of "dangerous" individualism,
one which threatened the foundation of their social order. It was not simply a matter of
letting Hutchinson spread her ideas freely--not when those ideas could carry the Puritan
conception of grace to such an extreme that it translated into an overall abandonment of
any structured church, which is to say, the basis of a Puritan society. Miller states how the
followers of Hutchinson became caught up in a "fanatical anti-intellectualism" fed by the
original Puritan "contention that regenerate men were illuminated with divine truth,"
which was in turn taken indicate the irrelevance of scholarship and study of the Bible.
Both possibilities were potentially destructive to the Massachusetts Bay colony, and both
only carried out Puritan ideas further than they were meant to go (Miller, I: 14-15); the
individualistic tendencies that was embedded in the Pilgrim community, exists as well with
the Puritans. In reference to Tocqueville's use of the term in volume II of Democracy
in America, Ellwood Johnson goes so far as to say, "The anti-traditionalism and de-
ritualization of society that he named Individualisme had their sources in Puritan
culture. This Puritan individualism had survived especially in the habit of judging others
by their characters of mind and will, rather than rank, sex, or race..." (Johnson, 119). Of
course, as Johnson notes, Tocqueville's experience in America was limited both in time
and geographic location. But Hutchinson and her followers were banished, after
all, and while Puritanism did substitute the more simplified approach of Ramean logic to
replace the overly recondite and complicated mediaeval scholasticism, and while it
fostered a more personal mode of religion with its emphasis on individual faith and access
to Scripture instead of the structured ritualism and mediation of the Catholic church, it
nevertheless took for granted a society and state which relied upon what was only a
translated form of class division, and which depended upon a hierarchy where the word of
God would not become dispersed (and so, altered) into a kind of religious precursor to
democracy. The Puritans had themselves suffered repeatedly under a society which had
seemed to evince the potentially ominous side of the relation of church and state. The
king was the leader of the church, and the state decided how the church was to function,
and in 1629 when Charles I dissolved parliament, the people found that they no longer had
any political representation, any means to act legislatively. Their secular agency had then
become a measure of their religious agency; the removal to Massachusetts in turn was a
way to gain a political voice, to create a state that would develop according to their own
beliefs and fashion itself harmoniously with the church.

It was not an effort to establish a society wherein one might unreservedly express
what one wished to express and still hope to have a say in communal affairs. If religion
was to come to bear on the governance of the society, to what good would a more
egalitarian, democratic form come? The integrity of the community as religious entity
(Winthrop's "citty on a hill"), which had been the purpose of their coming to America,
could only be, at best, weakened and dispersed, and at worst, be challenged to such a
degree and in so many ways that there would be no agreement, no action or political
effectiveness. Their religion itself would seem to be faced with a prospect of which kind
does not easily (if at all) admit--a prefiguration of what is now called 'gridlock.' Despite
what some later commentators would say, Puritanism and Democracy were not
coproductive ideas, no matter how much one might have anticipated, and even allowed the
eventuality of, the other.

One who stated the problems which would ultimately unravel Puritanism as a
dominant political force was Roger Williams. For one thing, Williams's critique of the
institutions being developed in Massachusetts directly illuminates the difficulty indicated
above--that of perpetuating a religion which both held the seed of an increasingly
liberating individualism and at the same time maintained the need of a limited meritocracy.
The primary point of contention for Williams began in 1631 when he declared that the
church in New England was, in its failure to fully separate from the English church,
inadequate, and tainted. He removed to Plymouth, where he remained for a year. But
even there "Williams wore out his welcome" (Heimert, 196). Part of the reason lay in
another of Williams's critique of New England as it was developing, that the lands granted
to the colonists had been unjustly given by the crown, because they had not been first
purchased from the Indians. For his efforts, Williams was banished. His primary response
to this was one of his more threatening ideas, "that the civil magistrates had no power to
punish persons for their religious opinions" (Miller, I: 215). This was not necessarily an
over-arching argument for full toleration, but rather implied a statement specific to
Christian salvation, that "no power on earth was entitled to prevent any individual from
seeking Christ in his own way" (Heimert, 198). For the Puritan ministry, this was far
enough, because it targeted the strongest tie between it and civil government, and thus implied a
potential disconnection between the two. As John Cotton wrote, the question of
"mens goods or lands, lives or liberties, tributes, customes, worldly honors and
inheritances" was already the jurisdiction of "the civill state" (qtd. in Hall, 117), but the
establishment of laws which fostered Christian principles and punished threats to them--
that was only part of the continued and increasing realization of divine will on earth.

That dissenters such as Hutchinson and Williams were banished, suggests what has
recurringly been described as a major factor in the evolution not only of the Puritan
theocracy, but of supposed national identity in general--the frontier. Both
Crevecoeur and Tocqueville portray the pioneer type, the individual who, being away from
the influence of religion and mannered, social customs, becomes increasingly rough, and
even near-barabaric. This same figure is also seen as a necessary precursor to more and
more 'civilized' waves of society. Another view of the frontier effect comes with the
increasing democratization of the United States, where populist movements occur such as
the Jacksonian Revolution, suggesting a kind of evolutionary mode through which the
American socio-political 'self' is more and more fully realized. For Puritan society, Miller
suggests a more socio-economic effect, where the frontier increasingly disperses
communities and so disperses the effect and control of the clergy, and where the drive for
material profit begins to predominate over the concern with "religion and salvation"
(Miller, I: 17). And if the frontier demands more a stripped-down material efficacy than
the finer attributes of 'culture' and class distinction, then so too does frontier-influenced
religion lose its taste for the nicer distinctions of theological scholarship, and move instead
toward a greater simplicity, toward the eventual evangelism of the Great Awakening in the
1740s, further out toward "fundamentalism" and other forms of belief that had long-since
ceased to be Puritan.

caveat--a note on the jeremiad

At this point one must step back with a bit of caution, and once again take note of an
important provision underlying the terminology. That is, in using the term "puritan" above
and assigning to it a set of characteristics and preponderances, I must qualify the grounds
of the (non)definition. Specifically, an argument such as that belonging to Darrett Rutman
becomes useful, even if one does not take it as far as does he (in using specifically against
the likes of Perry Miller). Primarily, he takes issue with an approach to history that
employs only the selected writings of a selected few, in determining some "notion of
Puritan quintessence"--one which is supposed to represent all of Puritan New
England, ministry and laity alike. As he puts it, this "view of New England
Puritanism...rests upon two major implicit assumptions....that there is such a thing as
'Puritanism'...and that the acme of Puritan ideals is to be found in New England during the
years 1630-1650" (In Hall, 110). His argument is correlative to one which Sacvan
Bercovitch will take up in The American Jeremiad, where he points out that
historians, in assuming this so-called decline, are simply following the lead of "Cotton
Mather and other New England Jeremiahs." Taking statements such as Mather's,
historians, instead of seeing it as part of a tradition of "political sermon" (to use
Bercovitch's phrase) that could be evinced all the way from the sailing of the
Arbella, have instead interpreted them as even more historically specific, reactions
against an increasing lack of coherence between religious and secular authority, and
declarations of a failing mission. Rutman indicates the "pragmatic value" of seeing the
jeremiad this way, in that it helps isolate a model of Puritanism, and narrows the historian's
task to one of describing the thought of a specific twenty-year period.

Rutman's basic argument rests on the recognition that, to gain a clearer picture,
one must study not only published sermons and theological treatises, but also more wide-
ranging anthropologic data--records of social, political, and economic relations within and
among individuals and communities. Into the specifics of this, one need not go; a study in
this vein of Sudbury, Massachusetts, reveals underlying instabilities that challenge
assumptions of a dominant Puritan 'theocracy,' but then this is not so far from Miller's own
conclusion, that Puritan ideology held within it the basis of its own loss of control. The
point here is rather the point from which Rutman begins and with which he concludes, that
one must be careful not assume an essence of identity to be described before attempting to
describe simply what one finds, that such an assumption may lead to dangerous
equivocations between the ideology of Puritanism and the history of New England (and
extrapolating from that, much of the United States as a whole).

It is the old instability--that between the religious and the secular--which the idea
of Puritanism contains. The confusion then becomes translated into the historical
perspective in terms that, as Bercovitch states, come from the jeremiad itself: "the New
England Puritan jeremiad evokes the mythic past not merely to elicit imitation but above
all to demand progress" (Bercovitch, 24). For Bercovitch, who reads those key texts of
the 'Great Migration'--John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" and John Cotton's
"God's Promise to His Plantations"--as important transitions into distinctly
American forms of the jeremiad, this entails an "effort to fuse the sacred and
profane," to historicize transcendent values and goals into what he calls a "ritual of errand"
(Bercovitch, 26,29). Defined then not so much by pre-existing social distinctions but
rather by a continual and purposefully-held sense of mission to which the modern idea of
'progress' is intrinsic and out of which the notion of "civil religion" (as Kammen would
say, "memory in place of religion") develops, Puritanism, as an ideological mode and not
(Rutman's) historical "actuality," suggests America as a modern region from the very
beginnings of its colonization.

Less so with historians than popularizers of a Puritan mythos, the evocation of a
"golden age" existing less as past fact than future promise, comes to dominate the sense of
'Puritan tradition'. This, as Bercovitch indicates, is at the heart of 'explaining' America,
with all its promise as a New World, with its idea of Manifest Destiny, with the kind of
self-idealization of National Purpose that Henry Nash Smith describes in Virgin
Land. The modern perspective and its blurred secular and religious (or moral)
understandings, thus is what will be explored in the sequel.